AMD's just revealed its quad-core Opteron chips manufactured with its new 45nm process. Based on the "Barcelona" chipset, the new "Shanghai" chips have a few extra tweaks: the L3 cache has risen from 2 to 6MB, giving it about 35% boosted power performance over the previous generation. The new chips also have better power management, meaning they can draw up to 35% less power under idle conditions, are compatible with DDR2-800 memory for faster memory accessing, and are backwards compatible with existing Socket-1207 mounting. These 75W server chips are out now, between 2.3 and 2.7 GHz clock speeds, and a desktop variety, dubbed "Dragon" is due early 2009. [AMD and PCWatch]

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